


if your heart wears thin

by bittereternity



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: AUish, F/M, Fluff, Schmoop, even cannibals need some good ol' schmoop, i ship them so hard, this pairing you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 23:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittereternity/pseuds/bittereternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Okay, look, if I were, you know, <i> all there</i>," Will gestures towards his head, "I would probably call you a friend-ish person."</p>
<p>Beverly raises an eyebrow. "Charming," she deadpans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if your heart wears thin

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! First fic for the fandom and I just had to write about these two because, ugh. I ship Will and Beverly together so much and I've tried to keep them as IC as possible, so apologies for any OOC behavior they might display. This fic is a little AU in the sense that Will doesn't kiss Alana, but I guess the timeline is fluid for the most part. Concrit welcome!

*

and i'm really really glad  
you're not into dependent  
clauses since all i'm really  
interested in is your  
bad, bad grammar  
and your exclamation point.

\- Daphne Gottlieb

*

There’s a Kevlar strapped to his chest and blood on his hands. It’s disorienting, adjusting from the darkness inside the basement to the glaring, revolving lights of the ambulance and the sirens of the police cars. Somewhere to his left, Jack is telling the SWAT team to back down, that it’s all over.

Will looks down and there are blood splatters on his shoes. There’s blood on his hands too, but he’ll think about that later, only in the dark and he will remember how the suspect’s eyes had widened, how she had dropped the knife from her limp hands just a moment too late, how she had realized all too late for it to matter that she was _dying_. He will remember the blood on his hands too, but this is not for now.

Beverly walks up to him and looks at him in a way that makes him feel vulnerable and raw and itching. “Your shoelaces are untied,” is what she says, matter-of-fact.

He jerks at the sheer abruptness of her statement and then looks down to find his white shoelaces undone, splattered with residual drops of dried blood. He looks back up at her but Beverly is still standing there with her arms folded, an eyebrow raised.

“You _can_ tie your own shoes, yes?” She shifts her weight from one foot to another and dares him to say no.

He nods dumbly.

Whatever she sees on his face must be something significant because she relents a little, her stance and her shoulders relax and she leans forward to press a palm on his shoulder. He closes his eyes against the pressure, anchors himself to the soiled ground against her touch.

There is blood on his hands, the gunshot is still ringing in his ears because no matter how many times you do it, it doesn’t get easier; seeing the life go out of a body never quite gives that sense of déjà vu, and all Beverly says is _your shoelaces are untied._

It isn’t that she misses the blood and the red and the murder and the haunted look in Will’s eyes as he processes the _I killed someone_ drumming through his head. It is, in fact, impossible to miss the drops of blood that have splattered and dried on different parts on him, if anything else.

She asks him if he can tie his own shoes, and what she means is this: _you’re more than all of this._

For what is love if not the simplicity that bleeds even through intense terror?

What is love if not this: worth it?

*

Later, she will say that she was the one who saw him first.

“I have a new team,” Jack tells him, his coat sprawled all over Will’s desk and Will tries really hard to resist the urge to spit something out like _think of the crime scene bacteria you’re transmitting, for god’s sake._

Instead, he bites his lips and pushes another beer towards Jack’s direction.

“New team?” he prompts.

Jack sighs into his drink in a way that would make Will lean forward and touch his hand except, well, crime scene bacteria. He compromises by making a vague hand-gesture and Jack expels another loud sigh. Will tightens his fingers around his own bottle and wets his fingers against the condensate dripping around its sides.

“I’m not quite sure how to be polite about this,” he says finally, because Jack is breathing like it’s causing him physical pain and Will has always been good at skirting around personal boundaries.

Jack huffs. “I don’t bite,” he says gruffly.

Will feels a sudden, unexplained surge of affection towards the man hunched over his germ-ridden coat on his desk. “What happened to Miriam isn’t your fault, Jack,” is all he says.

Jack looks up sharply. Will’s afraid for a second that he might throw the bottle at him, but Jack retreats within himself within seconds, much like a cowered lion. “I try telling that to myself every damn day,” he growls, but his voice is soft, softer than Will is used to. “It doesn’t work.”

Will opens his mouth to say something else, but there’s a knock on his door. He’s the first one to look at her because she is still engrossed in her files and Jack is still buried somewhere within his bottle.

“I’ve closed the file on the Cincinnati Stalker,” she states, presumably speaking in Jack’s direction, as she arranges papers around in the folder in her hand.

Jack looks up. “Good,” he says and turns towards Will. “I thought you were looking for the case notes for your lecture next week? You can coordinate with Dr. Katz for the information.”

Will looks at her just in time to see her giving him a small wave of introduction. Jack stands up – and picks up his germ-soaked coat, thankfully – and he follows, intending to show Jack out in a gesture of quiet solidarity.

He’s almost out of the door when he hears her voice. “Wait for me,” she calls out and he does, turns back and waits for her to take the few steps out of his office. “I’ll give you a hand with the autopsy reports, if you would like?”

He nods, and follows her towards the morgue.

Later, she will say that she was the one who saw him first.

She will be wrong, because there had been, somewhere in between, ten whole seconds where she had been engrossed in arranging her file and he had glanced up from his beer and he had seen, well, her hair and her shoes and her arms and her fingernails and the angle of the shadow cast on her –

Not her face, never her face, but he had seen her first nonetheless.

*

It will not, of course, ever matter who saw what when how where.

The list of things that these ten seconds aren’t include: destiny, love at first sight, important.

The point is, these ten seconds are: Will’s.

*

“Here,” she passes him a sealed bottle of water and sits next to him on the steps of their victim’s house.  “Thought you might need some rehydration after that.”

Will is still breathing heavily from analyzing the crime scene, still floating in that headspace where he may or may not have killed that family.

He clutches blindly at the bottle without comprehension.

“Drink,” she repeats firmly. Instinctively, he finds himself unscrewing the lid and taking a few large gulps of water. He looks at her only to see that she’s watching him closely.

“Do you think I’m capable of that?” he wants to know.

She stares at him in a way that makes him want to squirm, makes him feel like he’s unknowingly giving way _too much._ He doesn’t though; it seems suddenly important that she answers him.

“You’re not a murderer,” is what she finally says, and he hunches back on himself. It isn’t an answer, but then, he’s come to realize well enough the special pull of her ambiguity.

“That’s not an answer,” he points out.

She lets out an irritated huff. “You’re not asking the right questions,” she tells him.

_That_ makes him turn and he grits his teeth, prepares to launch into a fully referenced explanation of why she’s _wrong_ , why this has always been the most important question ever since he’s decided to make a career out of selling out his emotions.

She gets it somehow, nevertheless. “Everyone is capable of that,” she explains, raising a hand in mock-surrender against his tirade. “The question is, do you _want_ to?”

He frowns. “No,” he begins, and she cuts him off before he can say anything more. “In that case,” she says, voice light, “why does it matter?”

He opens his mouth, only to find that, for once, he doesn’t _know_ what to say to that. He opens and closes his mouth a few times before she finally pats him on the back and stands up, brushing up the dust from her jeans.

“Come on, you can give me a ride back,” she says, extending a hand out for him to get back up. He reaches forward and takes it.

*

“I’m a _medical_ doctor,” she emphasizes, looking up at him from the floor. “That means human patients only.”

He quirks his lips in a manner that’s probably supposed to be a pout. She doesn’t seem impressed.

“Why don’t you get your Dr. Lecter to do this for you?” she asks again, one hand buried within the molars of his latest canine.

He shrugs. “He’s my shrink. I can’t ask him to come over at five in the morning because my dog has been up crying half the night.”

She gives him a _look._ It would be a lot more effective, he thinks – but vows never to tell her – if she wasn’t currently attired in a robe with trees on them.

“She was crying a lot,” he tries to justify, but Beverly bares her teeth at him in a barely concealed growl. She reaches further inside and _pulls_ before finally emerging with a flesh-covered bone in her hand.

“She had this between her teeth,” Beverly tells him. “It was probably infected, but it should be okay now.”

Will gives her a rare, full smile. “I’m glad I called you instead of Hannibal,” he teases. She continues just _staring_ at him, and he’s suddenly half-afraid that she’s going to put her hands on her hips.

His shoulders slump. “Okay, look, if I were, you know, all _there_ ,” he gestures towards his head, “I would probably call you a friend-ish person.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Charming,” she deadpans, but he knows from the way her muscles twitch that she’s trying to hide a smile from him.

The next moment, seized by a blinding panic and bubbling laughter and a source of unexplainable courage, he leans forward and grasps her wrist – infected bone, be damned – with his hand and kisses her.

If nothing else, he thinks he can always pass it off as a way to dispel the sheer cheeriness of the moment.

*

“I kissed Beverly Katz,” he tells Hannibal, pushing past him to pace around the office.

Hannibal goes over to his desk and pours two glasses of wine before pushing one towards him. “I assume this is not a typical therapy hour?”

Will downs half the wine in one gulp, deriving a form of vindictive satisfaction from watching Hannibal’s lip curl at his lack of fine etiquette.

“Did you want to kiss her?” Hannibal asks.

Will looks down, sips more of his wine and tries not to think of– her hair, the slight lack of moisture in her lips, the smell of mint toothpaste at the corner of her lips, the way she pushed her glasses up before staring at him, the way she kissed him _back –_ the kiss.

He knows the answer is _yes_ , even as he doesn’t say it out loud.

*

There is blood on his hands, the gunshot is still ringing in his ears because no matter how many times you do it, it doesn’t get easier, seeing the life go out of a body never quite gives out that sense of déjà vu, and all Beverly says is _your shoelaces are untied._

It isn’t that she misses the blood and the red and the murder and the haunted look in Will’s eyes as he processes the _I killed someone_ drumming through his head. It is, in fact, impossible to miss the drops of blood that have splattered and dried on different parts on him, if anything else.

She asks him if he can tie his own shoes, and what she means is this: _you’re more than all of this._

He knows he’s going to fall in love with her, then.

*

He’s _this_ close to running after their kiss.

Beverly finally corners him after he’s steadily avoided her for three cases by attaching himself to Jack and asking ridiculously formal questions like _will you please pass me the reports, if it isn’t too much of an inconvenience._

“What the _hell_ are you doing?” she hisses at him after she’s practically wrenched his arm backwards and excused the both of them from the lab.

Will looks down. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing,” he finally says.

“ _What?”_ she hisses.

Will takes a deep breath. “Okay, here’s the thing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing because I don’t know how to talk to you because whenever you’re near me, all I want to do is to grab you and kiss you. It’s not in the best interests of the case, obviously, because whenever you’re speaking, I’m focusing on your hands and your mouth and it’s taking me more time to make connections.”

Her eyes narrow into slits. “You’re _blaming_ me for being attracted to me?”

Will resists the urge to throw his hands up in the air. “Hannibal thinks I may be delusional,” he finally says.

She sighs and reaches forward to touch his hand with hers. “If you want to kiss me,” she begins, her voice softer than before, “you don’t have to _think_ quite so much.”

Will looks at her. “I don’t?” She shakes her head again.

He takes a step forward towards her. “Okay, so let’s say I,” he traces the outline of her face with his index finger, “want to pull you this close to me and kiss you, you’re saying this is alright?”

He bends down to kiss her on the lips and feels her nod against his skin.

“He’s wrong, you know,” she half-whispers against his ear when they break apart.

“What?”

“Hannibal, he’s wrong,” Beverly murmurs. “You’re not delusional, not about this at least.”

Will’s smile is so wide he can feel his cheeks hurting.

*

Later, he will try to remember what her first words to him were. Not because he holds any special importance to the words or the order in which they were spoken, but because it is yet another memory with _her_ in it that he wants to have for himself.

He will think her first word to him had been: _hi._

Later, he will prove himself human when he won’t be able to remember.

*

“Are you leaving soon?” Will asks, knocking on the door of the lab and waiting for her to look up.

She smiles. “Give me a minute,” she replies.

He crosses his arms and leans against the doorframe. “I thought I might walk you out, you know, be all gentlemanly.”

She huffs out a laugh and turns back to look at him in the midst of packing her bag. “So your action has no ulterior, ungentlemanly motive whatsoever?” Beverly laughs, and switches off the light to the lab.

Will lets out a startled laugh. “You’re not very good for my sanity, you know,” he tells her.

She leans up to kiss him on the cheek and pats his head affectionately. “You never had much to begin with,” she assures him.

In reply, he gently yanks her arm to pull her closer to him. He trails his fingers down her arm until his hand reaches hers and smiles when he feels her fingers curl against his.

*

Will will not know this:

In reality, her first words to him had been: Wait. For me. 

*

 


End file.
